Another first of the season: the first night I turned off of I-25 sooner than usual on my way home from work. (If you drive that river of asphalt north, you know what they’ve been doing to it and the less said about that, the better.) As the interstate narrowed to one lane, I turned off on a frontage road and rolled the windows down to smell the air. The sun had finally faded. Everything around me was bathed in silvery blue as it reflected the last rays the sun had blazed before tucking itself behind the ridge. I stopped at a railroad crossing to listen for trains, or so I told myself, but it was really to gape at the view under the underpass, the almost imperceptible line between gray fields and blue foothills paling before my eyes.

And the fragrance of a spring night … when will computers be able to paste that into a file? After a sunny day, our Front Range air is usually too cold and thin and dry to hold a scent. But tonight, after a cloudy evening — ah, the aroma of disced earth and cut grass and water-filled ditch and only the faintest whiff of manure … all of it astonishingly free of any taint of diesel. Was there a tease of rain as well, or was I imagining it after reading the forecast? Weeks ago, the first big bug splatted on my windshield. Tonight, the first moth flitted by.

Friends and co-workers pity my commute, wonder why I live up here. But it has its joys. Windows down, the soothing scent of fields of grass bathing my face … that’s one.

Right. Back to reading about gardening: Marvelous book, “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” by Joan Dye Gussow. Published in 2001, this could be the locavore predecessor to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Vegetable, Animal, Miracle.” (Kingsolver actually blurbs Gussow’s book on the cover). Gussow and her painter husband, Alan, always gardened, but began in the 1970s to seriously consider growing ALL of their vegetables themselves — year-round, in New York. And we whine about OUR short growing season! After 30 or 40 years in a 13-room Victorian where vegetables struggled in the shade of huge trees (but they had a killer root cellar in which to store them) they buy, as they near their 70th decade, a 150-year-old house in Pierpont, with a back yard that runs all the way to the Hudson River. Misadventures with the house ensue, and I would never want to put spoilers about what happens with THAT in my blog. Let’s just say “150-year-old salt hay for ceiling insulation.” And oh, a little bit of flooding. But … their new property had room for TWENTY 15×3-foot VEGETABLE BEDS! SO enviable! (Well … except for that flooding thing.)

And if you want to age gracefully? Check the photo of Gussow on the book’s cover: wide grin, a fat bunch of beets in her fist, and how about them biceps! The hell with “gracefully”; let’s age with MUSCLE!

In the midst of telling the story of their new property, Gussow interjects recipes and recounts the birth of the local food movement — along with carrot-thieving neighbors, architects who don’t listen and kitchen gardening as a matter of moral responsibility. Becoming engrossed in this book has been facilitating my denial about how tall, leggy, and floppy my tomato and tomatillo seedlings have gotten and the fact that I’ve been meaning to start a second batch of seedlings (eggplant, melon, basil, zukes, leeks) but can’t quite face it yet.

I got my copy of Gussow’s book at the Denver Public Library, which actually also has a few copies of Kingsolver’s book that are NOT checked out. Good luck if you want it on audio CD, though; you can get in line behind me, and I’m No. 29 on the holds list. If you have a NON-iPod MP3 player and a Denver Public Library membership, you can download the audio version of Kingsolver’s locavore manifesto for free; to learn more about how, begin here.

Just in case you want to listen to something other than the wind rushing into your car windows on YOUR commute.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.